Architects: The Latest Architecture and News

Do you think maybe it’s people that respect and admire these architects, and it’s reflected on their fan pages?

I was asking myself this question a few minutes ago, so went online to do some quick research and Googled “How much do architects earn per hour?”.

We, the architects, are a special breed. We have very particular tastes, dress in very particular ways and we even invented our own language. For us, a pen can be even more meaningful than our computers, and you might find yourself looking all around town for that perfect standard notebook that you have used for ages. So we decided to compile this special gift guide with things that we use, we like, and that we would love to find below our christmas tree.

Hope you like it! Feel free to share your gift ideas for architects on the comments below.

From the mid 1900′s to the beginning of the 2000′s, being an architect as a profession has made its way into key roles on the big screen for many big shot celebrities. Whether the roles they play in the movies are similar to the reality of the profession or not, I’m sure many architects that have watched some of these movies feel honored that their profession is one that deserves to be highlighted in ways that are not not just in architectural publications, but in the cinema world as well. More images after the break.

Office disputes happen all the time, it’s in our architect’s DNA.

The Iakov Chernikhov International Prize for Young Architects recently announced its 2010 laureate, Fantastic Norway, recently featured here on ArchDaily and now we have the complete Top Ten nominee list to share with our readers. Among this group of young and promising architects you will find some outstanding works that will hopefully go a long way to shaping the future of the profession. The complete Top Ten and links to their work after the break.

On November 17th Fantastic Norway was awarded the 2010 Iakov Chernikovs Architecture Prize by the ICIF. We here at ArchDaily have previously featured the work of Fantastic Norway and wish to congratulate them on their accolades and share with our readers some examples of their work.

More after the break.

Charles Holland, director at UK based firm FAT Architecture (see their public bathroom proposal for London) runs Fantastic Journal, an interesting blog on which he recently published the following open letter to us, the other architects:

It’s that time of the year. Architectural Record has published their list of Top 250 architecture firms. The companies are ranked according to revenue for architectural services performed in 2009 in $ millions.

The list is compiled from a survey conducted for Engineering News-Record’s annual Top 500 Design Firms Sourcebook. As last year, number 1 was for AECOM Technology Corporation, an engineer-architect firm from Los Angeles, California.

The firms classify themselves by:

A = Architect AE = Architect-Engineer AP = Architect Planner EA = Engineer-Architect AEC = Architect-Engineer-Contractor

See the top 25 after the break.

Derek Leavitt (@architectderek on Twitter) recently posted an opinionated blog entry on ‘Why Open Architecture Competitions Are Bad for Architects’ . The author outlined why entering competitions is detrimental not only to the individual, but also to the field of architecture.

Competition has been a defining characteristic of architecture for centuries.  Without competitions to spur creativity, a young woman would have never submitted her graceful yet powerful black line…and we would be without the Vietnam Memorial.  Without architects using competitions as a way to test urban gestures, a young team would have never submitted their idea to use just a portion of their allotted site, leaving the rest for a public plaza…and we would be without the Pompidou Center in France.  And, dating quite farther back, without an Italian man initially losing a competition and then determined to further his architectural understanding, we would be without the grand achievement of Brunelleschi’s dome.

The point is that although competitions are demanding, and at times may seem unfair, they are a staple in our profession which pushes the field forward.  With this in mind, we will attempt to argue in favor of the open competition, in the hope that we can persuade and inspire you to keep listening to your instinctive competitive nature and keep compiling those entries.

Philip Johnson (1906-2005), one of the most influential American architects portrayed by David LaChapelle.

Livestream + Live4Space are co-hosting a live interview with Daniel Libeskind today at 2:00PM ET (GMT -5). Thanks to the Livestream platfom, Libeskind will not only discuss his role on the WTC master plan, but will also answer questions by the audience. All you have to do is go to the streaming website here and send your questions during the interview.

Joshua Prince Ramus is one of the best architects I’ve meet, and also a very good speaker. I think most of you have already seen his presentation at TED back in 2006, where he presented the Seattle Central Library, a powerful talk on which he talked about the role of the architects in the process, as an editing/team approach rather than authorship. We interviewed Joshua back in 2008, where we first heard about his position regarding the separation of conception and execution on architecture, as architects became the “artists” leaving the execution to engineers, which can be seen on the first minutes of his talk at TEDx Dallas posted above, before explaining how the Wyly Theatre re interpreted the typical theatre programatic configuration.

A great part of our day is spent browsing architects websites looking for new works to share with our readers, and we have noticed that some are very good, while others were such a pain to navigate…  So we decided to go and ask our community about this.

Last week, we asked our Facebook Fans for the best architecture office website they knew. We checked them out and decided the top 10, with no particular order. We looked for the best ones in terms of looks, navigation (is is easy to navigate? Is it fast? Can you go back without reloading the menu? Can you link directly to a specific project?), presentation quality, does it look up to date?, projects (can you sort them by location? by year?).

Also, you will notice that no flash website made the list. That’s because we think flash websites have some dificulties. For example, you can’t link a specific project and Google can´t index most of the contents. So we decided to create a ‘honorable mention’ list with all the flash websites we thought deserve it.

Remember to keep participating through our Facebook Fan Page! The complete list, after the break.

Via mirage.studio.7 we ran into this list of fictional architects in movies. There are some classic ones, like Henry Fonda. Some new ones like Adam Sandler. And there’s even an actual architect who made it to The Simpsons.

Which one do you like the most? The least? Is there anyone missing in this list? Some actor/actress you would really like as an architect in a movie? Tell us what you think. Full list after the break.

Update: Images and sources were taken from mirage.studio.7. They did this article with different sources like DanStewart, Ajolote Boletin, Archinect, ArchitExploitation, and more.

Each year, Wallpaper* Magazine bring us a list of 30 emerging practices around the world. This year, they decided to ask each of the 30 practices to create their ideal model home.

You can find the complete list with their model homes after the break. For more details on each project and office profile, click here.

CNN's Talk Asia just featured an interesting interview with Rem Koolhaas. At the beginning of the video we see the Prada Transformer in action.Highlights of this interview are Dubai, which lead to Koolhaas talking about the public sector and the stimulus, and his views on the Generic City.When talking about influence (Rem was on the 100 most influential people list by Time magazine in 2008) and "star architects", Koolhaas sentences the term to death:"I think it's a name that is actually degrading to the vast majority of people it is applied to. And it really is a kind of political term that for certain clients is important because they use star architects. My hope is that through the current complexity that title will exit discretely and disappear".

Cliff Kuang from Fast Company has ranked the 10 most creative people in architecture. That doesn’t mean they’re the best, just the most unusual and influential visions in the field.

Be sure to check the architect’s works published on ArchDaily!

The complete list after the break.